“Is Charlotte around?”
Beatriz stood there relaxed, wearing her little black stretch pants and red everything else.
“No, she’s at her place.”
I wasn’t in the mood for any more surprises.
“Oh, I thought this was Charlotte’s place.”
“No.”
“Oh.”
“Do you want to come in?”
I stood in the dark hallway for one second too long.
“You mean this is your place?”
“That’s right. Charlotte has a place uptown. Are you hungry? I’m just about to make some eggs. Is something wrong?”
“Nothing. I lost my breath coming up the stairs. Sure. Do you … uh, mind if I look around?”
Everything was just the way I remembered it. There was one chair in the living room. The one I shivered on while Punkette danced. The tumor record was still on the stereo.
“Where did you get this album” I asked, holding up the jacket cover. It was a black-and-white photo of a French clone trying to look like a forties American movie imitating a thirties French movie.
“That’s Daniel, my son. He thinks he’s white these days and spends his money on these atrocities. Have you ever listened to this music?”
“Once.”
“So you know it’s terrible. I said to him, ‘Daniel, this is bad music. It is worse than what you hear on the elevators in department stores.’ But all he can say is, ‘It’s wry, Ma. It’s pretending to be stupid. You’ll get it someday, leave me alone.’”
Beatriz had a huge personality in that tiny body, and the difference between the two was quite clear. One was sharp and dangerous, the other, simply adorable. Like you could cuddle her until she got completely bored and bit your head off.
“The Gambino family opened a punk club down the block and he’s been wasting his mind hanging around there with the moneyed youth. He is sixteen now and totally beyond my influence. Last year he thought he was Puerto Rican. Even refugees from Argentina think they are better than all other Latins. Especially Puerto Ricans. Did you know that?”
“No, I didn’t. Is that how you feel?”
“Not here in New York City, the great equalizer, where we all become spics. Besides, I’ve never been a nationalist. Argentines are like Americans, master barbarians.”
Beatriz started cooking up onions and scrambling eggs. She kept talking with her back turned, so I could choose between looking at her body or looking around the apartment and she wouldn’t know the difference. I kept my hands in my pockets and tried to see everything, looking for remnants of Punkette. I was so uncomfortable and tense, I felt out of control and needed to do something that made an impact. Just so I could be sure I wouldn’t disappear. I walked around a bit in the tiny kitchen looking for something to hold on to when, on a whim, I stopped by the front door and quietly snatched the matchbook cover off the peephole. Then I had a secret too.
“My son is ugly to me these days.”
The onions were sizzling on the broken stove.
“The more manly he becomes, the more I find him so … unattractive. His face is too long. His skin is bad, like mine. He has no grace. The girls his age are so much more alive and brilliant. That’s when I was the smartest, age sixteen. I knew everything I know now, but I didn’t believe myself.”
She could tell me anything. It didn’t matter to her at all. I glanced, sideways, at the exposed peephole; it was huge. Beatriz was sort of humming and then she started laughing to herself. I was feeling nervous, sweating. She’d surely notice the hole in the door, then what would I say? She started to set the table, still laughing. What was she laughing about when everything was so serious? She looked up, suddenly, and caught me panicking. Then the door slammed.
I turned around expecting Charlotte’s black eyes, demanding to know what had happened to the peephole. But instead, it was an overgrown teenaged boy.
“Daniel, why do you slam the door?” Beatriz said, knowing he was already in the next room.
Her son was homely and brash, filled with an authentic street cool of his own invention. His Nikes were laced, not tied, his cap was on backward. He had suspenders and wore his belt invitingly unbuckled. His style was too new and homemade to appear in any magazine. In two years it would all be mass-produced for white kids to wear, but for the moment Daniel was a happening young man. He was chill. He was fresh.
“Daniel, did you get the lock I asked you for?”
“I forgot.”
“Well, don’t forget again.”
“All right, Ma, all right.”
He was filled with an energy that could as easily become brutality as anything, and had inherited his mother’s masculine nature, a woman’s masculinity that is too delicately defined to transfer well to sons. He smelled of the future and that future was frightening to me because I couldn’t imagine ever being ready for it. There was too much in the present that I didn’t understand. He kept going in and out of the bedroom, looking at me in the eye once in a while. I noticed his huge feet as he was out the door again, back to the things that were really important: matters of power and honor.
Beatriz was quiet for three heartbeats and then resumed her faint humming. I looked for something to say.
“How do you like living on this block?”
“Too many junkies. They’re even stoned when they rip you off. We got broken into but they left the stereo and took a cheap answering machine. Too stoned to steal properly. Can you imagine? Then, after a bit of time, they die. Probably only got ten dollars for it. Junkies sell everything for ten dollars.”
Beatriz pointed to a dusty square on the side table where something had once been, something that was now sitting comfortably but underused in my living room. So Punkette needed small change and she needed it right away—or just wanted it, that might be more like her.
We sat down together at the table. Beatriz poured water from a clay pitcher and offered me good bread. She tore her piece in half and put it by the side of her plate.
“This neighborhood is a prison between C and D, Coke and Dope. You stay young in prison, did you know that?”
“No.”
“In my country, I remember a famous criminal who had been sentenced when he was twenty and when he came out he was sixty. People gasped on the street when they saw his photograph in the newspaper because he stayed young while they’d all become old.”
Then she grabbed my wrist and pulled up my sleeve. Her grip was like iron. Even though she was half my size, she was completely determined and in control.
“No, Beatriz, I don’t have any track marks.”
“Good. I hate junkies. They’re liars.”
“Well,” I said, still feeling her fingerprints on my wrist. “Crack’s the thing these days anyway. No needles, no marks, no AIDS.”
She went to the mirror and started combing her hair, changing her earrings, changing her scarf. Her hands and feet were very tiny and her slippers, refined.
“Don’t think that I’m afraid of death. It is the waste of time that disgusts me. In Argentina, I killed a woman, but it was a political assassination. I can say this freely, knowing it means nothing tangible to you.”
I was eating eggs with a woman who said she had killed another woman, at least one, because she had to. Claiming it was almost as good as doing it, choosing to be known as a murderer. I wanted to be repulsed, but discovered, instead, a twisted admiration. Beatriz stretched her mouth tight, waiting for lipstick.
“Now a woman is dead who would have been murdered eventually and I have survived into this life.”
I looked back at the open peephole.
“You in America don’t have this decision but everyone else in the world must choose between making love and making history. You Americans impact on the world simply by eating breakfast, with so many people working so hard so you can have it exactly the way you like it. For the rest of us, we have to fight to affect anything, or else just live our private lives of h
ope and sorrow. If I want power in the world, then the world must take priority, not personal habits like love. At precisely the moment when I become convinced of which direction is most necessary to me, the other presents itself. Now, theater, that can be made for love or history.”
“And now you’re making it for love?”
She smiled a tired smile. It showed the beginnings of a wrinkled face that would become increasingly exquisite with old age.
“I make theater with Charlotte. Sometimes in the early morning she is smiling, plotting in her sleep, being wild in her dreams. I brush back her hair and say, ‘Bad, sleeping beauty, bad.’ Because she is the mischievous imp in every fairy tale, and with a woman like that, all you can do is pretend. Those are the moments when I can see so clearly what we can make together. And you? What kind of family do you come from? What does your father do?”
“He’s a narc in the Dominican Republic for the CIA.”
“Oh, the intellectual type.”
And we both cracked up laughing.
We were drinking coffee by that time and I could see right through the peephole into the hallway. It completely altered the apartment. It was staring at me, like Beatriz was staring at me. I needed another question, quickly, so she wouldn’t look at me so hard.
“How did you and Charlotte meet?”
She was really solemn for the first time that afternoon, as though all this talk about murder and politics was throwaway chitchat but Charlotte was a serious matter. Beatriz’s eyes were like the nipples on Coco’s lover. Dark and sharp as swords.
“Onstage, of course. I’m not usually attracted to actors. In fact, they are my least favorite people in the theater. I could never say words I don’t believe, not for money, or approval, certainly not for the principle of being convincing on any terms. Watch out when an actor tells you, ‘I mean what I say.’ That’s the biggest lie of all. With Charlotte, the first thing I saw was her way of holding a script over her mouth so that only her eyes showed, laughing.”
She illustrated her story with a napkin at the kitchen table.
“Even though it was hidden, you could imagine the mouth and how wicked it was.”
Beatriz poured more coffee into my cup and I realized that I was beginning to slide. Maybe there was a bottle somewhere. If I kept drinking coffee, eventually it would kick in. I hoped that would be soon.
“In theater there are many moments inside of one moment, so without the precision of emotion, the play is nothing. It is slop. Charlotte and I were working together for the first time and we were developing a nuance that had to make itself understood in a matter of seconds. I tell you, she had me crying. She was wiping tears off her own face and slowly painting them on mine until they dripped down my cheek and onto my tongue. I know she’s selfish, but she can fool the magician. She fell in love with me first, though, and I’ll tell you why. It’s because I’m not beautiful.”
Yes, you are, I thought.
“Beautiful women never take beautiful women for lovers. They like elusive faces and quirky expressions. It’s because they want to be loved for themselves, but they also demand adoration. And they don’t ever want competition. Especially from the same bed. But, she unleashes me. Our first night together we had talked all evening, strolling the summer streets, with sirens and water pouring out of hydrants. Two elderly women were yelling in Spanish, their fat arms sticking out of cheap housedresses. When the time came to make love, I was sitting on my bed saying, ‘Come here,’ and Charlotte walked towards me in a moment filled with wanting and compliance. She took those steps across the dark room. She didn’t look at me, but there was volition and desire and her body coming closer with no affectation. It was a raw honesty that showed me then how much the rest of my life was lies.”
13
I WENT STRAIGHT from Beatriz’s house to The Blue and the Gold and started drinking in a little booth behind the jukebox. When you begin to think about drinking and staying away from it, every dark street sends out a personalized path of light leading directly to a bar. It offers something to do, a place to watch the clock, and when you’re drunk enough to sleep, you can go home. But, if you stay out of bars, there’s nowhere to go but home, and then no place to go from there.
The news was on the TV but they were bombing Libya and I couldn’t handle that. Then the channel got changed to the ball game, which doesn’t interest me at all. I had to find something to think about in a stein of flat beer and a bag of Dipsy Doodles. When that’s your evening activity, the beer goes down real fast and then there’s nothing to do but buy another one. I was thinking about smashing Delores’s face with a hammer, when I looked up and there she was. She was sitting at the bar, legs crossed, drinking a White Russian. She had dyed her hair bright orange and was bouncing her foot up and down in Sunshine’s clothes, expensive and too big for her. There was a white headband wrapped around her forehead that made Delores’s skin pale and her wrinkles deeper. She didn’t look hip. She looked silly like Grandma Bozo.
I wanted to run out of there, but where to? Or run right up to her and scream in her ear, or flash Priscilla’s gun, which was home in my drawer. I wanted to spit on her and break her neck and beg her to come back to me.
Delores was so close, I could hear her swallow. The sound gurgling in her throat made me nauseous. If I listened to the rain the way I listed to Delores’s spit, I would have drowned right there in the bar. She was the woman with whom I had been living and loving, and at the same time a monstrous orange thing.
The day she left, I sat in my apartment, so sad. I didn’t know how to be that sad. She was yelling at me and I just sat there.
“I’m leaving you for a woman who is going to marry me. You had your chance and now you just can’t take it.”
“I can’t help it that I can’t take it,” I said.
What did I love about Delores? It was something concrete that she would do or say, it was how I’d feel when I saw her. She was always so happy when I came home and she liked being next to me walking down the street. She’d slip her arm into mine and say, “Oh, I’m so cozy.” It was a sense of well-being above anything else. The problems started when she talked about “forever.” My idea was that we stay together for as long as it worked and then something else would happen. You never know which way a relationship will go, so you have to be creative. I couldn’t say “forever” unless I knew for sure it was true. But, I believed that Delores was my friend, so whatever changes we went through, we’d go through them together. I had a picture in my head where we’d talk it all over stage by stage and try this or that, always being considerate and in touch. I wouldn’t picture it any other way. But, as soon as Sunshine came along, Delores split. Sunshine said “forever,” so she wasn’t interested in me anymore. It’s not like we had stopped getting along or stopped having sex—everything was intact except the future. Man, was I surprised. I was so used to Delores being my friend and she changed so fast that I let her hurt me too deeply because I didn’t know enough to treat her like a stranger yet.
“Delores, can’t you just be nice and talk to me for one minute so we can figure something out?”
“You had your chance,” she said.
See, from my point of view, Delores didn’t play fair. When you dump your lover, you should show a little consideration to the woman you’ve been whispering to in the dark for so many nights up until that one. Not Delores. She took what she needed and then cut out. She was not sentimental. She was seasoned. Sometimes I thought Delores didn’t know how to take care of herself, so she needed to find other people who would do it for her. If they didn’t do it well enough, she’d get rid of them. After all, Delores was no spring chicken and you get tired of hustling. People like that run into a lot of lowlife and sometimes they become lowlife themselves. Her lover before me broke her nose. The one before that took her money. Both guys. Some nights I’d listen to Delores tell me about the brutality in her life and secretly I felt frightened, but I didn’t know of what. Then one
day I wasn’t hearing about it, I was living it. It wasn’t just Delores’s stories anymore. It became our life together.
I remember one night we were walking home late along the avenue, both in suit jackets with girly decorations. We were both pretty. I looked up at her and said, “You know, I think you’re my best friend, Delores.” And she scrunched up her face in a kind of pure happiness you rarely get to bring out in another person.
“No one’s ever said that to me before,” she said. “That’s what I’ve always wanted, a chum.”
I remember watching her against the eerie glare of headlights knowing that I was the person Delores cared about the most. Now I’m the one she most wants to break. I guess that means I know her inside out. That’s why I can’t let go. Something organic keeps her right there, next to me. Whenever I move, she follows me because Delores left everything unresolved and that was a dirty trick.
Once, about two weeks after she left, I saw her across a subway platform in a crowd of people and she looked pretty, but seeing her alone and so close in that bar, she looked terrible. I’ve watched that face say so many different kinds of things. I’m afraid when I see her now because each expression is familiar and would evoke memories that, good or bad, I wouldn’t want to be thinking about if we were to meet. I’d rather just be present. That Delores. I don’t know what was missing, generosity or need, but that last day, boy, she was on a campaign of slash and burn. She was screaming at me, jumping around in a carnival of hate, trying to destroy everything, and I just turned off. I knew inside that there was no way to react that would have changed anything.
So when she came over and stood at my table at The Blue and the Gold, I knew I would be thrown into chaos.
“That’s my shirt,” she said.
“Hi, Delores.”
“That’s my shirt and I want it back.”
She was holding her White Russian with its little swizzle stick. I didn’t get up but I could clearly see her expression. It was blank.
“Hey Delores, where’s your yuppie girlfriend?”
After Delores Page 7